"Eating" ---The Movie

All in the line of duty, I finally watched an overly long flick called Eating. It was made in the early 1990's by Henry Jaglom, an English-born indy director much lauded by some as idiosyncratic. ( Evidently he achieved early fame with a faux food film called Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?)

Eating centers on a Southern California birthday party honoring three women of different ages. Untold numbers of mostly thin, svelte women show up for the event, including a young French filmmaker who is doing a documentary on the California American scene or some such.

The women drift hither and thither, admiring others' bodies, loathing their own, and eventually they go before the French gal's camera and whine about food, sex, men, love, mostly the lack thereof, and so on.  The sole voice of sanity is expressed by Frances Bergen,  astonishingly lovely at 70-something.  ( She's  Candice Bergen's mom.)  She plays the lead character's mother and is repeatedly flabbergasted by the absurd notions these pampered neurotic gals have about good old food.

At one point the guests do dive into a big spread on a buffet table, a scene that inexplicably appears after they have all recoiled in horrific clucks from the obligatory birthday cakes. ( One character, God bless her, chows down throughout the film. )

I started doing whatever you call "fast forwarding" in DVD parlance right away--fortunately, I caught this one line:

" I'm still looking for a man who will excite me as much as a baked potato."